Dunes and Mountains, Evening. Death Valley National Park. April 2, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Dunes and rugged desert mountains in evening light, Death Valley National Park
I made this photograph near the end of a very long day in Death Valley National Park. Most of the day was not spent photographing, though I did make some photographs. In keeping with a personal resolution to visit areas of the park that I had not previously seen I had gotten up early and gone to a remove valley that is apparently not visited all that much. My initial idea of visiting the specific place came, as it often does, on what was essentially an accident and a whim. While reading about the park I came across the name of the place, realized that I hadn’t heard that name before, looked it up and figured out where it was, and decided to go there. Since I’m not sharing photographs of the location in this post, the specific details aren’t important, though I’ll share that it was a long drive on rather rough roads — and I finally ended up at a place where the road simply ended in a very quiet little valley high in the desert mountains.
After spending a bit of time alone in that spot it was time to retrace my route back to where I was camped, and by the time I finished the return drive it was almost time to think about photography in evening light. After hours of driving earlier in the day I decided to shoot nearby, and I ended up at these familiar dunes, though perhaps not in the area that most folks go. In fact, during the hour or more that I spent wandering around here with my camera I did not encounter a single other person — though I could see people off in the distance at times. Here I found a spot with an almost clear view across the complex shapes of the dunes, looking toward the rugged mountain landscape along the east side of the valley, and I photographed through the last sunlight and into the early evening.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.